New Surface Duo with Windows drivers bring Windows 10 support and tons of improvements

Earlier this month, Gustave Monce (@gus33000 on Twitter) released a new set of drivers for the original Surface Duo running Windows 11. The update brought much-improved Surface Pen support alongside other quality-of-life improvements. One week later, another release landed with re-introduced Windows 10 support and a massive list of fixes.

Here are the new features in DuoWOA drivers version 2303.83:

Windows 10 18362/18363 is bootable again (more details below in fixed issues). Currently, it is only bootable using UEFI variants with Secure Boot disabled. This should help users get the value needed to configure calling functionality. Please note calling functionality may work but because of broken audio speaker support currently, you will not ear anything at all through the phone. Including with external audio sources.

Battery Charging is now an optional component. The reasoning behind this is including it from clean installations is going to lead to a broken install in 100% of all cases. Further more, having this functionality currently will lead to unstability during sleep that will cause the device to randomly reboot.

USB Host is not forced anymore, this means OTG dongles requiring external power from the device will once again be misdetected. The reasoning behind this is the "fix" for this particular issue broke more than it helped with.

Introduces the USB NCM Function driver, allowing a shared network connection via USB FN from Surface Duo to the computer it is connected to. This is part of an ongoing work designed to enable local deployment of applications from Visual Studio to the device. This is not yet finished.

And here is the list of fixed bugs:

Addresses an issue where Microphones were not functional anymore with recent driver updates

Addresses an issue where clean installations would often result in a bugcheck (BAD_IMAGE_BOUNDS_CHECK)

Addresses an issue where plug detection was hardcoded to inserted, leading to issues with usb.

Addresses an issue where Windows 10 18362/18363 was not bootable anymore

Addresses an issue where the sensor driver would not expose the goemagnetic sensor correctly

Addresses an issue where the Surface Display Configuration service would fail to start on downlevel versions of Windows

Addresses an issue where the Audio driver would not work correctly anymore under Windows 10 18362/18363

Addresses an issue where the sTPM driver would not function correctly under Windows 10 18362/18363 and would prevent a successful boot of the operating system. TPM still remains broken under that operating system and will get fully fixed, at a later time.

Addresses an issue where the USB FN/Gadget configuration was outdated for modern versions of Windows

Addresses an issue where the device would fail during sleep, eventually leading to a spontaneous reboot due to an issue in CPU Core 0 sleep power management

Addresses an issue where the device would fail during sleep, eventually leading to a spontaneous reboot due to an issue with battery management

Addresses an issue where the reported driver stack version was not correct for the past few releases

Addresses multiple issues preventing correct handling of USB TypeC PHY notification events from the device PMIC. In other words a few USB C detection issues should now be resolved in this release.

Addresses an issue where the display name of the SAR device driver was malformed.

Addresses an issue where DRP USB role was not available anymore

Addresses an issue where a few UMDF drivers, notably, the AT&T remote shutdown device, the Connection Security Manager, the Surface Firmware updater were not loading correctly anymore under Windows 10

Installing Windows 10 or 11 on the original Surface Duo remains a complicated and highly technical process, so proceed with caution and read the provided guides carefully (find them at the GitHub link below). Besides, there are several notable limitations and known issues, such as unstable battery charging, broken audio, wonky brightness controls, and many more. You can find the list of confirmed bugs on GitHub.